They do: The model of credit unions was actually invented in Germany (Genossenschaftsbank/Raiffeisenbank) and later copied all over the world.
Now a question from me: What happened to credit unions during the US savings and loans crisis in the 80s?
Last note: Unlike in the US or the UK (Northern Rock), in Germany or Switzerland banks don’t go bankrupt. They always get rescued by the state (i.e. the general public) - they just screw you as hard as they can.
Yes. Same goes for EU countries. They basically get a “do whatever you want, you will be rescued anyway” card.
The non-profit nature of credit unions seems to be carrying them through banking crises unscathed. And it really upsets the banks!
Not getting good vibes with MEGA.
I’ve found too much publicity implying improprieties and too much government light being shown on it’s operations and businesses.
Think I’ll wait a while.
Can you provide citations?
Outstandingly positive review. Not a single real point against MEGA. It confirms what I know of MEGA. Great company, great practices.
Again, positive review. Where’s the bad stuff? (Plus, there are collaboration options. Perhaps the reviewer did not see or understand them.)
Again, everything in green light.
Everything nice and dandy. There was only a single negative claim: false flagging of supposed illegal content. Never happened to me or anyone I know. Maybe he had a bad day or truly uploaded something suspicious and shared it with tons of people. That said, it’s not the fault of MEGA when the country policies and laws are too tough to come by.
Only good points and the negative points are partially wrong! There is a lot of software from MEGA, that is OPEN SOURCE! Why do they say it’s not open source?
For the last link:
Wikipedia is not a credible source for topics that even remotely touch politics. Never trust Wikipedia on anything that might seem political. There is hard evidence, that there are plenty of left extremists behind this platform in the form of administrators and moderators. I could link you the citation, but it would need to be translated first.
Great, I love this dude! He’s a great guy.
Thank you for showing me all this MEGA praise. It seems like I’m not the only one that loves MEGA so much. MEGA is truly the best cloud service for non-business customers I have ever heard of and even all those reviewers seem to agree.
I am using the service since about 6 years and couldn’t be more satisfied. I told all my friends to get this service and I have yet to hear any negative thing about that back from them.
I’m using it too, and I can only agree…
Do you get anything for bringing in new folks?
Just asking for future reference when (if) I join.
Much depends on how much cloud space I need after my great family photo/video purge I’m dealing with now.
My intention is to use more than one cloud storage service for backup.
No, I never get anything for bringing anyone to MEGA, DietPi, Borg or whatever I talked about a lot. I know how it looks, when someone is paid to voice a certain “opinion” about a product. That’s why I generally am not involved in any referral program. Every admiration towards a product or service is done, because I actually admire them. I do not get a single penny from any company for doing any kind of promotion.
I am not the PR type of guy, anyway. If you look at paid shills, you will always see how they are always nice, calm and never try to enrage anybody. Do I look like I never enrage anybody?! 
That’s also the reason why, when you read my articles admiring a certain service or product, you will never see a referral link anywhere. I always post the normal generic links, without any referral code. I even cut off metrics referral codes, that wouldn’t even give anyone money in the first place, as those are purely for statistics.
There is a nice free tier (which I personally use) that you can try. If you don’t like it, just don’t log in anymore.
With MEGA you get lots of security layers, that make using the Cloud much more bearable. I can truly sleep well at night, due to that. I couldn’t be so calm if I would use SkyDrive (OneDrive) or Google Drive for important files.
“I know how it looks,…” never crossed my mind. Just thought I’d let them know how I heard about them is all.
Well, okay, at least I am always suspicious of people who say stuff and coincidentally they say something in favour of the people who pay them…
Funny that the first response to the original post was about ads and most of the thread has screenshots containing… ads. 
I don’t trust any cloud storage for my data. I still use Google Drive, but put there only files I intend to be somewhat public, and there’s no real loss if I loose it.
As my main storage use my self-hosted Seafile server.
In such cases I recommend for example:
But I also like:
In terms of real world experience;
How does encryption affect performance?
Is there much difference in file access time?
Does it heighten possible data loss (other than forgetting access codes)?
Thinking disaster recovery, what about accessing from external encrypted drive to alternate PC.
Which of these would allow “file” sharing like ‘g’ drive via “contact” names??
In this specific case it does not affect performance, because you just have to decrypt all files once before accessing the target files.
In this specific case, there is no difference, as explained above.
It’s the same as with unencrypted targets. You have to keep integrity of the encrypted target, the same way as if the target was not encrypted. The only difference might be in trying to restore corrupted files. It is way easier to get information off corrupted files that are not encrypted.
Despite the “interesting battle” about services, ads, bears and prices, and back to the original questiion, I think the Nextcloud option + DuckDNS for remote access is a good (and OpenSource also) option if you want to leave the Google services and don’t want to purchase any Open Hardware or commercial NAS.
AFAIK, the user mention Netxcloud is running well from local so, for accessing from anywhere on the planet, simply add DuckDNS or the DDNS service you want (No-IP, Dyn, etc…) and you’re in.
Sometime ago (Spoiler alert: promotion to myself on It’s Foss :D) I wrote a post talking about dropping Google, using (mostly) opensource options, including alternatives for gDrive.
One of these alternatives (OnlyOffice) have a Plugin for Nextcloud (and Owncloud, Moddle and many more) that works exactly a gDrive does. Keep an eye in case you’re interested…
Another option could be build your own NAS using a Raspberry Pi + UPS/SAI + OMV/Nextcloud + DuckDNS and the gazillion GB/TB attached HDD/SDD you want to use.
I use this method to access/sync my data from my laptop (no matter I’m in the middle of the mountain or at my house toilette) to home and vice-versa, and I’m very satisfied. Specially not only because I’m avoiding any monthly/annual billing (Hardware is mine forever), but I’m the only one that can have access to the data (anyway is a good idea the Veracrypt/Cryptomator option) and (of course) because I’m using Opensource programs and Hardware. If you also add SyncthingFork (available on F-Droid) to the team, then you can take any photo from your Android camera phone and send it immediatelly ti your RPi NAS. Internet is full of tutorials explaining this so, I’m pretty sure you can find one that suits your needs…
Cheers!
Benny.
I just read your other post. Most impressive.
I’ll be referring to this one AND that one numerous times.
Very good information. I’ve never hear of DuckDNS so I’ll give it a hard look.